ChatGPT Now Turns Fake Election Photos Into Cartoons for the Midterms
With the US midterms a week away, ChatGPT now turns requests for misleading election photos into cartoons. A Brennan Center test found it was the only one of six AI image tools to clearly improve.
Ask ChatGPT for a realistic photo of trouble at a polling station and you will now get a cartoon instead. With the US midterm elections a week away on 3 November, OpenAI is forcing election images that could mislead voters into an illustrated style, so they can’t pass as real evidence.
OpenAI set out the change in an update to its 2026 election safeguards on 20 October. Requests for images “depicting election interference or that may discourage voting” now come back as stylised illustrations rather than photorealistic pictures. The company says its rules against election interference still apply, even to cartoons.
What happens when you try
CNET put it to the test. Asked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers standing outside a polling place, ChatGPT produced a cartoon every time, including when the reporter asked it to make the picture look real. A request for a news-style photo of a voting machine recording the wrong choice, a common election myth, also failed to produce a realistic image.
“The problem with deepfakes isn’t social commentary, it’s deception,” Josh Lawson, OpenAI’s head of elections, told CNET. The aim, he said, is to “degrade the evidentiary value of an image” while leaving room for satire and illustration. A deepfake is a fake image, video or audio clip made with AI to look like the real thing.
The number: one in six
An independent test points the same way. The Brennan Center for Justice reran its election disinformation tests on six popular AI image tools on 22 October. ChatGPT was the only one with a significant improvement, turning nearly every harmful prompt into an illustration. Two others, Google’s Gemini and Meta AI, made convincing fakes easier than in the spring. Gemini’s images looked more like phone photos and lost their visible watermark, and Meta AI made a fake executive order it had refused in April.
The other three, Black Forest Labs’ Flux models, Runway and xAI’s Grok, showed little change, with Runway and Grok still producing realistic images for nearly every prompt. DailyAI has covered concerns about Grok image generation before, and a Google DeepMind Studie found deepfakes were the leading form of AI misuse.
Die einfache Lesart
A cartoon is much harder to pass off as proof than a photo, so this is a sensible bit of friction. But it only covers one app. Anyone set on making a fake can still turn to tools with weaker limits, and there is no promise OpenAI keeps the rule after the election. If an image of a polling place looks shocking, check where it came from before you share it.
